When I went to watch some only episodes of star trek on Amazon Prime, the player would get stuck on updating. I followed the instructions here and doing so actually worked for 3 seconds. It was the oddest thing. Clearly the video was playing and I saw 3 seconds of the episode, but a message came up saying I needed to update my flash player. I tried loading videos over and over again, but no success, not even the 3 seconds. Here is the error message:

Sorry we were unable to stream this video. This is likely because your Flash Player needs to be updated.

So has anyone been able to play prime instant videos, and if so, under what circumstances? Is there perhaps an alternative implementation of the flash plugin I can use? Or is the cause of my problem something different altogether?

Problem probably has to do with the version of flash being used. If anyone has gotten Prime to work with an my current version of flash or an open-source/free implementation of it, please do tell. Or if anyone can get videos on amazon to play with any other parameters aside from changing my browser to chrome, please tell me.

I'm not going to post this as an answer since I'm not satisfied with it. So Adobe decided to make new versions of flash for linux using Pepper plug-in API developed by google instead of the Netscape plug-in API used by every other browser except Internet Explorer which uses Active X. Reasons why they did this would instill much debate. However, Amazon Prime requires I guess the newest version of flash which maybe is the problem. Anyone know any forks of firefox that has the ppapi? The only work around I can see is using chrome, which doesn't answer the question.
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NilApr 27 '13 at 1:34

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I doubt it will help, but you can try Gnash, which is an open-source implementation of Flash. IIRC, however, it's outdated (I'm not sure though).
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strugeeApr 27 '13 at 2:02

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I tried installed proper Google Chrome (not Chromium) as well. Had to symlink the old udev library to get it to run, but it still didn't work.
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Sajan ParikhApr 27 '13 at 2:26

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@nil, you don't need to actually install libudev.so.0 as in 13.04 libudev.so.1 exists. If you simply force the install, ignoring the dependency check, then symlink libudev.so.0 to the existing libudev.so.1, you can get Chrome to run just fine.
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Sajan ParikhApr 27 '13 at 3:01

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I don't think it's a flash issue now. I just looked on my 12.10 installation where it is all working just fine, it and it has the same version of Flash as on my 13.04 where it doesn't work. 11.2.202.280
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Sajan ParikhApr 27 '13 at 21:18

This works beautifully. Better than firefox in wine! Would you mind explaining what the problem was and why this fix works? Also, I'm running the 32 bit version of raring, so it works for both versions.
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NilMay 2 '13 at 2:47

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This fix also made it work in firefox. You are the man!
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NilMay 2 '13 at 2:51

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Amazing! Would be great for someone to explain this a bit more though. Glad things are working again. From the fix, it looks like it was an issue with HAL.
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Sajan ParikhMay 2 '13 at 6:15

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Apparently hal isn't working properly on 13.04. It is missing directories and not running when it is supposed to. Seems that hal functionality is being roled into udev.
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AaronMay 2 '13 at 17:13

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Thanks for posting the solution. I understand that udev replaced hal, but since hal is still provided and still required for Flash DRM, perhaps a bug should be filed?
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aapMay 3 '13 at 2:58

When playing videos on Amazon Prime, I notice no artifacts or anything that would detract from the viewing experience. Even with the extra layer of compatibility, it runs just as if it were native. If another solution appears in the future that doesn't require Wine, I will update that as the correct answer.